Field
The present disclosure relates to an apparatus and a method for measuring a moisture content of a compressed recycled paper bale, and more particularly, to an apparatus and a method for measuring a moisture content of a compressed recycled paper bale, which may obtain a vibration model of the compressed recycled paper bale and may measure a moisture content by using vibration of a measurement target bale based on the obtained vibration model.
Description of the Related Art
In general, recycled paper is compressed and processed in the form of a bale, and the compressed recycled paper bale is purchased by a processing company and then recycled to new paper products. However, a water feeding process of adding water into recycled paper is purposely and frequently carried out to increase a weight of the recycled paper when collecting the recycled paper, which causes problems.
If the bale has a high moisture content, the amount of paper in the bale, which may be recycled, is relatively reduced. Therefore, yields decrease and values of recycling deteriorate during a raw material process, and thus a process of accurately measuring a moisture content of the compressed recycled paper is very important to the development of the recycling industries.
A method using an electrical resistance method is most widely used in the related art as a method of measuring a moisture content of a target, and Korean Patent No. 10-1153168 (registered on May 30, 2012, entitled Multifunctional Moisture Measuring Apparatus) discloses a moisture measuring apparatus which includes a measuring unit that measures electrical resistance values between a stationary electrode and a movable electrode, and measures a moisture content of grain.
However, the electrical resistance method may be easily applied in a case in which a target, which is subjected to the moisture content measurement, has a small volume like the grain, but it is difficult to apply the electrical resistance method to a target, which has a large volume and is irregularly arranged, like the compressed recycled paper bale. Therefore, a method of measuring a moisture content of a partial region of the compressed recycled paper bale and applying the measurement result to the entire bale is used.
The method in the related art uses the result of measuring the moisture content of the partial region of the single compressed recycled paper bale as a moisture content of the entirety of the single compressed recycled paper bale, and as a result, there is a problem in that reliability deteriorates.
In addition, it is possible to more reliably measure a moisture content by measuring moisture contents of several portions of the compressed recycled paper bale and calculating an average value of the measurement results, but there is a problem in that this method requires an excessively large amount of time to measure the moisture content.